Parallax. Maureen Mulhern

      Listening to the breaths of creatures

      Barely visible. The lizards

      Slipping beneath hibiscus leaves

      Were oddly human in their muteness.

      And in my blurred sight

      Palmettos snagged across the walls,

      Mapping out haphazard trails.

      In the hospital’s room,

      As I tried to read, my eyes could not

      Leave the words humming-

      Birds, dragonflies; when they lifted up

      From the page, a balm of wings

      Swirled beneath my pillow

      In a column of dust, sand and sun.

      Next to me, an old woman

      Was brought in from a Nursing Home

      With a Condensed Reader’s Digest,

      Small black purse, comb, slippers,

      Rosaries and glasses. The blood

      That poured from her, night and day,

      Gathered into pans, the sound of rain

      Made slow and magnified.

      When I left, I leaned down

      Over her face, my shadow moving

      Between us; her eyes were distant and specific

      In that half-light. It was June

      When the early morning’s poultice broke

      Between a word and its sound, a body

      And its death. The memory I have

      Of that woman is of her strength and silence,

      How language was a forgotten thing,

      Her relatives apologizing

      For the inconvenience of it all.

      Daydreaming at the Beach

       …just before I finally fall asleep

       My body scatters the dark particles

      Like a shoal dispersed in the wake of waves.

      Sea gulls let go prehistoric shrieks,

      Bursts of violet-grey. Past the horizon

      I imagine dolphins and whales,

      Sun splashing against skin

      As they surface, curving behind my eyes.

      When I released my body

      From all its fears, made love

      With freedom, such complete light passing

      Through two bodies; a moment

      Of suspension, before a wave leans

      Into the next wave, descending back, a slight

      Vertigo of gravity between us.

      Your eyelids, when I touched them, turned

      To pale moths of gold.

      To envy gulls and sparrows,

      Their gibberish, their simple lives.

      Through my lashes, the sun, a straw hat,

      Thrown dizzily into the sky.

      I feel the soft, incomprehensible

      Locution of the wind, the birds flying

      Through my ribs.

      Die Forelle

      Tucked between the pages of “The Trout”

      An unopened letter, postmarked April.

      It’s late September now; six months

      This letter has lain next to the trout’s song

      Whose notes, like liquid hooks and tiny

      Whittled spines, squirmed impatiently

      For resuscitation and gravity to release them

      Up. The notes swam like tadpoles

      Between miniature lightning bolts, straying

      Telephone poles, ascending b b b b b’s,

      A few upside-down golf clubs,

      Others with the curve of high-heeled shoes,

      Legs and eyes of insects, dangling, not quite

      Fully assembled. All the while the letter remained

      Jammed between the pages

      Like a silent tongue. In dated language,

      The refrain, with lilting, false naïveté, sang

      Of how the trout will “never be taken

      Tho’long he persevere.” I wondered for a moment

      About the sender of the letter, of the letter

      Itself, which by now had taken on a life

      Of diminished singularity, and all the reasons

      Why it had been left

      Unopened in the death song of a trout.

      Out of some vague, distant, atavistic

      And not yet defined respect,

      I took that letter home, mailed it

      And as if it had anything to do with me,

      I watched it drift away

      Like a fish or a refugee, not knowing

      The circumstances of how it would be received

      And brought back

      Once again into this scrambled world.

      Edging

      Across the lake a wire of sun

      Climbs slowly up a heron’s leg;

      Clamped in the bird’s beak, a fish

      Glistens, twisting at the tail.

      Stones burst open;

      Over them, water spreads

      A cold, translucent hand. Brittle

      Planks of sunlight lean

      Against sea-grape trees and blue

      Pines stooping to their roots.

      Even by day the moon ticks on,